I once was in the same shoes, but moved on. All of it reminds me of what people now consider more of a LLM-assisted coding fallacy: the speed of writing code and the speed of your tools (unless its abysmal) is usually not the time bottleneck for writing a good program.
American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis
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Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis
#732I'm glad they've done the work here and put a figure on it - the impact absolutely needed to be quantified - but I also have to say... to the surprise of absolutely no-one with even the most basic grasp of how economies function. People, lots of people, lots of people who have a really deep understanding of national and global economics (unlike me), have been warning about this since talk of tariffs became common cur…
There is basically no overlap between the things that economists generally say are good (free trade, carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, immigration, land value taxes, organ trade, congestion pricing, etc…) and the things that populists of either the left or right say are good (rent control, price controls, tariffs, wealth taxes, debt relief, minimum parking requirements, etc…). Why would you (or anyone) be surprised that e…
Economics are hated because economical arguments are used to justify why we cannot do the necessary things all while doing things that bail out the rich for the tenth time.
You don't need to be an economist to realize who is getting fucked over. I am not from the US, but a vote for Trump for many was just a vote to burn it all down, especially because the other candidate was perceived to standing for perpetuating the status-quo.
I am not saying I like Trump. In 2016 when he was running for the first time I stood behind the back then very unpopular opinion that he is a fascist and I would have loved to have been wrong about it.
Economists claim to be like physicists, neutral and just observing, but somehow the economically benefitial measures always benefit the few at the cost of the many. Now that has nothing to do with economics per se. Marx was an economist after all. It has to do with how economics are used by the political class.
Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis
#733I'm glad they've done the work here and put a figure on it - the impact absolutely needed to be quantified - but I also have to say... to the surprise of absolutely no-one with even the most basic grasp of how economies function. People, lots of people, lots of people who have a really deep understanding of national and global economics (unlike me), have been warning about this since talk of tariffs became common cur…
The founders were skeptical of direct democracy because it assumes people have time and expertise they mostly don’t. People should not be voting based on their understanding of tariffs. It’s why we ended up with a republic. But social media changes the equation entirely. It gives us the speed of direct democracy without any of the structure or responsibility. It pushes people to judge candidates issue-by-issue, often…
In my book it is the duty of a democratic state to keep its population educated to make educated decisions. If you look at countries with more direct democracy like Switzerland not all the decisions are perfect, but they are by no means worse than if you had replaced the public vote with politicians that are heavily lobbied by corporate interest and have a time horizon that ends at their next election.
In fact you will find that in many cases the population will even vote for unpopular measures if they are discussed and understood well ahead of the decision.
But in the end that requires a decent education of the masses, a well functioning and uncaptured media landscape and a certain amount of democratic practise, all of which are missing in big parts of the US.
Democracy is something everybody actively needs to work on, otherwise it withers. If you want to have a nice village it works best if everybody perceives themselves as an agent of creating a nice village. If you want a shit village, you best give everybody the impression it is somebody elses task.
Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis
#734Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does elasticity matter if you no longer make a profit? Isn't the only thing that could matter - apart from strategic considerations of financing a loss for a time - if the margins are big enough? Who wants to pay for people to take their products below the full cost of making them, apart from some investor-financed hype startups?
1) You’re assuming there’s no profit to be made 2) Profit is implicitly embedded in the elasticity curve
1) No, please learn to read and to comprehend.
I wrote
> Isn't the only thing that could matter ... if the margins are big enough
2) No, the standard price elasticity of demand curve does not directly include profits. It primarily models the relationship between price and quantity demanded.
Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis
#735Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does elasticity matter if you no longer make a profit? Isn't the only thing that could matter - apart from strategic considerations of financing a loss for a time - if the margins are big enough? Who wants to pay for people to take their products below the full cost of making them, apart from some investor-financed hype startups?
This is what the supply curve describes. For each individual producer there is a hard cutoff but in aggregate these are a curve
No, the standard price elasticity of demand curve does not directly include profits. It primarily models the relationship between price and quantity demanded.
Supply curve??? The OP wrote "This is confirming demand is more inelastic"
Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis
#736Earlier quoted context omitted.
While your assessment may be true in many contexts, this is not one of them. American hyper polarization does not permeate other countries in the same degree and German academia is actually full of sober, level-headed, nuanced people.
This has never been the case across the history of humanity -- there has never existed a non-biased institution, and it's incredibly naive to think that a German think tank funded by the German government would be any exception. "Level headed" and "sober" people are not immune to the effects of incentives and conflicts of interest. Researchers are dependent on grants, on invitations to conferences, etc., and so are l…
If/since bias is everywhere and implicit because a person is that person and their own experiences, why point it out here so explicitly????
You do not point that out every. Single. Time. somebody argues even though it is true, or do you? Because that is just too shallow, that is the basis, nothing can be below that, so there is no point in pointing to the ground every time. So when you do point it out, it is YOU who has an agenda.
You are trying to shift the framing.
Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis
#737Earlier quoted context omitted.
The kind of older tourist visiting a foreign religious site is definitely going to be relatively indoctrinated regardless of their origin country. But yes, many Americans are indoctrinated. They also tend to be dominant in wide swaths of US geography and highly motivated by their indoctrinators to vote, thus maximizing their electoral impact. Many other Americans are pretty open-minded to new facts, even today. Unfor…
In Israel, virtually every Christian relic is fake. Some are hundreds of years old, but nevertheless fake. This is not a comment on Christianity as a religion. Religions need relics, and if they can’t find them, they are created. This is operating in modern times. I was working as a contractor for Intel Israel. They took everybody on a day trip. To an LDS temple to “see the organ” (what else?). An American LDS church…
> Religions need relics, and if they can’t find them, they are created.
I have long believed that being religious primes people to also lose the ability to think critically in other areas of their lives.
Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis
#738LLM analysis: https://hn-discussions.top/tariffs-burden-americans/
Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis
#739Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are using "believed" - past tense. Facts change nothing. This report means nothing. These people still believe. The report is wrong. They are right. The truth is whatever they want it to be, not something out of their control.
In fairness to this report, the report is about tariffs and their impact on...imported goods affected directly by tariffs isn't it? From an overall economic policy standpoint, missing facts that provide context are pretty important especially when you're trying to paint an entire side of the isle as completely brainwashed. Nobody can have a conversation when we create straw men to argue with. Other relevant context:…
> - US inflation has continued to slow at 2.7% with core inflation at 2.6%, continuing the trend from the last 2 years under Biden after a huge 9.1% inflation spike in 2022.
Because of the missing data from the shutdown, most financial people are putting the last inflation print closer to 3% which means it's continuing to rise.
Bringing up Biden is funny since that's so far in the rear view at this point. You going to also talk about how much stimulus Trump dropped into the economy during COVID? Regardless, Biden was POTUS when inflation spiked and was killed almost as fast as it went up. It was on a nice glide path back to target until Trump through a tariff grenade into the mix.
Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis
#740Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I have spent my whole life intimately involved with southern Republicans. They will never ever not vote Republican, let alone vote Democrat. It is an identity marker. It doesn’t even really matter what the policies are. They’ll complain for a while, but they will always internalize a Republican policy shift no matter what it is. They used to treat “free market economics” as a religion just 10 years ago. Secondarily,…
> They will never ever not vote Republican
As someone who grew up in the south, I know many people who left the GOP over Trump. Obviously not enough people have, but there is a glimmer of hope.